So we're about to start a new series of games, taking place 2 years after the last one we did end of 2013. I've had each player come up with ideas as to what their characters have been up to in the 2 year gap, to work into the game and for development too.

One player, a mystic knight of sorts, has said his character is trapped in Hell. Now, I don't mind the idea, in fact I think it'd work better if it happened during the game to provide a cool plot point. But he's insistent it happens BEFORE the game, essentially ruling out any possibility of him actually playing.

I have no idea how to work this one. I told him is not a good idea, but he's not listening to me. So I'm kinda stuck now. Should I just tell him outright no?

BlueBullet wrote:I have no idea how to work this one. I told him is not a good idea, but he's not listening to me. So I'm kinda stuck now. Should I just tell him outright no?

Seems to me that there are three viable options

Option 1: The party rescue him, which is predicated on the idea that the rest of the party knows he's there. (either pre-game or in the first story arc)Option 2: The players don't rescue him because they didn't know he was there & so the player makes a new character.Option 3: Or you engage Rule Zero & tell him no.

An if you don't like Option 1 because it conflicts with what you are doing you could combine all three options into a mega-option: You tell him the parties doesn't know he's gone because you as the GM have other stories you want to tell, so he can play a new character until you decided you do want to tell that story, if you EVER feel like telling that story, or he can just decide that that's not what he wants to do after all.

“Anti-Intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.”-Isaac Asimov

If the player is going to make a new character maybe he can make a legacy character. Maybe the knight's time in the inferno is different then our time, and while its only been 2 years for everyone else maybe its been 30 years for him. Maybe he has a son there from some woman or creature who tried to help him escape at some point: some half-demon child to be the new knight. Then, if you're interested in going that direction, the players can attempt a rescue at some point.

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood and perhaps feeling a little mean at the moment, but my first instinct would be to tell him that recovering from time spent trapped in hell is going to effectively take his character out of the running for quite a while, so that's just gonna have to be resolved either before the game starts, or as a rescue story arc that results in the knight ending up in a convent or monastary or something to recover from the physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds that such an event would inevitably cause, which could take quite a while of course.

Having said that, my gut reaction is that it's an attention grab on the players part where he wants the story to focus on him, and screw the rest of the players. That sort of thing tends to elicit a violent reaction from me, and very little gets me feeling meaner. I don't know if that's the case here, I don't know the dynamics of your players or group, but that tends to be my interpretation based on what you've said, so screw him is where my brain defaults to.

I'd recommend sitting down with the player and finding out more from him what he expects this trapped in Hell thing to be storywise. Does he want the character to actually be there when play resumes? Does he want to play someone else? Does he just want the character to have had this wild experience which effectively cut him off from interacting with regular people for two years, but now he's back?

Because the thing about doing a rescue a character from __________ story is that the story is typically more about the rescuer, not the rescuee. It would reduce the mystical knight to the MacGuffin of the story, rather than a featured player.